As Team Fortress and Day of Defeat server operators have noticed, Valve released an update tonight that broke SourceMod.
Usually we are able to handle updates very quickly. This one was different. There was no public beta, so we had no way of testing or preparing. To make things worse, Valve actually forked their Orange Box engine, broke compatibility, and didn't release new headers or any information about the changes.
With absolutely no warning, we had to reverse engineer these changes and update our source/build infrastructure for a new engine configuration. It's a testament to how seriously we take update parity that we were able to do this in one night on such short notice. But more on that further down. What you've all been waiting for:
There are now
1.2.2-dev snapshots available that will load on the new TF/DoD engines. We will get the 1.3 branch at parity tomorrow.
For users who have custom gamedata files, please note that we have separated TF/DoD into a new "orangebox_valve" engine property. The Orange Box engine that non-Valve games use is still "orangebox".
We are going to wait a few days to do an official 1.2.2 release. Sometime in the next two weeks there will be a Metamod:Source release as well - it's not needed, but we want to prepare for the worst. After this release we're going to redo our build infrastructure so adding new engine updates is very fast, both to wait for new builds and to support new games across the entire source tree.
This kind of update is extremely stressful on all of us - that includes you! We want to get things right in these situations, rather than damage the product integrity. The community was great in being both supportive and patient while we rushed to get something working. It means a lot both to moral and productivity that we didn't have to put out any fires on the forums or mailing lists.
In particular, it was amazing to see everyone on the SourceMod team work in unison tonight. We were all available for disparate chunks of time across random timezones, and we all have Real Lives to maintain. Despite this everyone pitched in (sometimes chaotically) and everything stitched together. So I would like to give a huge thanks to team members Fyren, pRED, DS, and bl4nk - and #smdevs participants Nephyrin, Drunken_F00l, and voogru.